Interview questions

I was recently invited to an interview for a frontend developer role. After the interviewer asked me a lot of questions about http, http2, devOps, linking backend with frontend he said: now let’s go to the more unpleasant questions. And he started with: what is this small tag at the beginning of an HTML page <doctype... And he went on about DTD then we moved to local storage, then CSS and pre-processors …

When and why did HTML and CSS became unpleasant? how else would you develop for the web if not using HTML and CSS?

I am now asking you: people of the world that you call yourselves web developers, who are you and what did you do with the web developers?